Neon Text Effect in Photoshop

To begin with, you are going to need some basic Photoshopskills when doing this tutorial. You need to know the basic Photoshop tools and how to navigate throughout Photoshop pretty well. This is not a hard tutorial to follow, but it can be frustrating if you are just beginning.

Ok, let’s get started with the neon text effect tutorial in Photoshop.

Step One. The first thing that you are going to need is a black background with some white text that you are going to use for your effect. I use a font that is square on the edges, and I have to make the text say OPEN 24hrs for my example.

Step Two. Once that you have your background and text ready, the next thing that you need to do is to go to the blending options for your text layer. You can do this by pressing the layer styles button at the bottom of the layers window (looks like a circle with an f inside) and choose Blending Options.

Step Three. Inside of the Blending Options window, you need to take the Fill Opacity all the way down to 0% using the Fill Opacity slider.

Step Four. Inside of the same layer styles window, click on the Outer Glow to add an outer glow to your text. You need to change the color of the Outer Glow to a good red color, change the spread to 15, and change the size of the outer glow to around 15.

Step Five. Inside of the same layer styles window, you now want to add an Inner Glow. Inside of the Inner Glow settings, you need to choose another red color close to the same as the outer glow, change the Choke to 10, and change the Size to 15.

Step Six. Still inside of the same layer styles window, you now need to add a Stroke. Inside of the Stroke settings, you need to change the size to 1px, change the position of the stroke to Inside using the dropdown, change the blend mode of the stroke to Screen, and change the color of the Stroke to a nice bright orange/yellow color. Now click OK to close the Layer Styles window.

Step Seven. Now you can see that you have a very cool neon text effect in Photoshop. Your text should now look like neon lights that look very realistic.